[libvirt] Cpu Modeling

Hi Jiri & Eduardo, You might remember a discussion with David Hildenbrand of IBM on the Qemu mailing list regarding a new Qemu<->Libvirt interface for cpu modeling. I am picking up this work from David and I wanted to confirm that we are still on the same page as to the direction of that interface. For your reference: https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2016-June/thread.html#01413 https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2016-09/threads.html#00489 The first link is to the discussion you were directly involved in. The second link is to the final patch set posted to qemu-devel. The cover letter gives a good overview of the interface added to Qemu and the proposed use-case for Libvirt to use this new cpu modeling support. I'll paste in the most relevant section for your convenience: --------------------------------Libvirt usecase---------------------------- Testing for runability: - Simply try to start QEMU with KVM, compat machine, CPU model - Could be done using query-cpu-model-comparison in the future. Identifying host model, e.g. "virsh capabilities" - query-cpu-model-expansion on "host" with "-M none --enable-kvm" <cpu mode='host-model'>: - simply copy the identified host model <cpu mode='host-passthrough'>: - "-cpu host" "virsh cpu-baseline": - query-cpu-model-baseline on two models with "-M none" "virsh cpu-compare": - query-cpu-model-comparison on two models with "-M none" There might be some cenarios where libvirt wants to convert another CPU model to a static variant, this can be done using query-cpu-model-expansion --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now that I've hopefully refreshed your memory :) I just want to make sure that you are still on-board with this plan. I realize that this new approach does things differently than Libvirt does today for other platforms. Especially x86_64. The big differences are as follows: 1. We will invoke qemu to gather the host cpu data used for virsh capabilities. Today this data seems to be collected directly from the host hardware for most (all?) architectures. 2. virsh cpu-models {arch} will also use a Qemu invocation to gather cpu model data. 3. Most architectures seem to use a "map" (xml file containing cpu model data that ships with Libvirt) to satisfy #1 and #2 above. Our new method does not use this map as it gets all of the data directly from Qemu. 4. virsh cpu-baseline and cpu-compare will now invoke qemu directly as well. Note: I'm not sure exactly how much all of this will apply just to s390 with other architectures moving over to the new interface if/when they want to. Or if we will want to change all architectures to this new interface at the same time. Any guidance? Thanks for your time and consideration. -- -- Jason J. Herne (jjherne(a)linux.vnet.ibm.com)